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Too many business owners and marketers expect their copy to click and convert, but only a few know how to get past the click part.
When you’re selling something, you can’t fall into the trap of mindlessly writing about your offer without regard to why people don’t buy and without knowing how to present your offers.
After reading this article, you should be able to go back to your copy, make sure it has the strategies you’ll peruse below and restructure how you write your future sales copy.
Related: 6 Reasons Your Marketing Copy Isn’t Converting — and How to Fix Each One
1. Learn why people don’t buy and work around it
If you budget or “categorize” your expenses each month or quarter, you won’t be shocked if I tell you your prospects do the same.
And thanks to the bottom-dollar effect, they’re probably not thinking about spending what’s left on your offer. The bottom-dollar effect is our tendency to be less likely to purchase products or services that would deplete our remaining budget. And even if we purchase, we are less likely to be satisfied with our purchases.
Say you want to invest in an online program that you know can help you scale your business, but you’re so close to capping your education bucket that you wonder if the investment is worth it. You buy it anyway. Then you ask yourself, “Was this the best use of my money?”
One effective way to help ease the bottom-dollar effect is by offering your leads a deal so that they feel that the product is worth it. This deal can be a discount, a free add-on, a payment plan or a 2-for-1. Add it to your copy!
You can also ease their anxiety by adding a guarantee. But, of course, this depends on the space you’re in and who you serve.
Related: How to Use Digital Consumer Psychology to Stand Out From the Competition
2. Drop the sophistication
If you want to form a real connection with your prospects, you might want to consider going easier on your sophistication and coming off as casual and sincere.
An 18-year-long study showed that brands that show excitement, competence and sincerity have a more positive effect on customers than sophistication and ruggedness. In fact, the influence of sophistication and ruggedness has declined over those 18 years.
Why am I telling you this? Because I know a lot of business owners who have shifted their entire brand voice and how they show up online. I’ve seen this time and time again, and I’ve unfollowed a lot of brands that I once looked up to simply because the spark that made me feel a connection with them was gone.
So if you want to sell more, relax your fingers, drop your shoulders and be more casual.
3. Use your humor
I’m not asking you to become a comedian unless that’s your business model. But, throwing in some humor shows your awesome personality and hits the two big marks of persuasive communication: clarity and conciseness. Because humor is often punchy – and honest.
By making people smile or laugh a bit, you’re connecting with them on a deeper level and they will feel inclined to trust you and buy your product — mainly because you made them feel something other than a reason to buy.
With humor, you humanize your brand, your product and yourself. Although written humor might seem forced, adding it to your video sales letters and presentations will make a massive difference in helping your prospects make a buying decision.
Related: You’ve Got 8 Seconds to Grab a Customer’s Attention. Here’s What to Do.
4. Minimize your calls to action
If you give customers many options to choose from, they will be more likely to hesitate. But if you give them fewer choices, they will make up their mind faster and buy.
Simply put, when customers have many options to choose from, they buy less. But, unfortunately, this also leads to more dissatisfaction because their expectations of your product are higher.
So, let’s suppose you have a sales page with three payment options, one of those being a “pay-in-full” and the other being payment options. They know they don’t want to pay in full because they simply don’t want to or can’t. So, how are they going to decide which of the payment options to choose from?
During that thinking process, they’ll be burning extra brain calories while raising their expectations. So even if they choose to buy from you with a payment plan, they won’t be too thrilled.
My rule of thumb when I work with clients is simple: one call to action is beautiful. Two are okay. Three are unacceptable unless absolutely necessary.
Related: 3 Critical Principles of Effective Calls to Action
5. Leave the essays to universities
If it takes you 1,000 words to say something, make sure each word serves a purpose. This is crucial when it comes to conversion copywriting.
Whatever you write must be as long as necessary and as short as possible.
People’s attention span decreases yearly thanks to overstimulation and bite-sized content. That means you have to work smarter with the content and copy you put out.
Your emails? Make them shorter unless they require all the details you’re including. The same goes for your sales page. Make it as long as absolutely necessary, so it tells your readers everything they need to know to purchase. Remove the fluff.
If you’re reading this, you made it to the end. Congrats! Now you have a job to do. Go optimize your sales copy.
